The 8 new TTRPG systems I've played since last October, reviewed (number 7 will SHOCK you!)

(Not including this October... it took me all month to write this post, alongside other things. So much for the second one dealing with board games and wargames!)

I've read a hell of a lot of games in the last year, at least a hundred or so if we count skims, far too many to review. I've also played or run a modest number, and a review based on that's more useful anyway. 

Here's the format:

Number, game name (linked), and mini-summary: obviously reductive. I try to fit a useful sense of complexity/weight, mechanics and genre into one line without any value judgements.
Designer/s (release date) publisher/host site: I'm generally only listing people who wrote and designed, not editors, artists etc. Not to denigrate the latter, just for space! If the list still gets longer than 5 people I will just include lead designers or the first name listed and add et al.
Test Conditions: If I homebrewed anything, adventure, number of players, length of session and how it went. Often includes my post-game 0-5 ranking for how much I enjoyed playing (since I keep track of that anyway to compare what types of games I have fun in), which does not contribute to the overall review score.
Form: 0-5 stars. Is the game prettily presented? Is the setting interesting? Anything that might be pleasant or inspirational - for this game or other games - but doesn't directly contribute to play experience. 0 is an unformatted word doc without any flavour text or art. 5 is Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition or a Warhammer Fantasy 6th ed army book.
Function: 0-5 stars. Is the book easy to reference? Do the rules work as intended, without any substantial gaps in systems it intends to present? Anything that makes the play experience smooth and produces the playstyle and emotional response the game seems to desire. 0 is, IDK, HYBRID? 5 is, well, the example I want to use is one of the games in this review so for now I'll say FIST: Ultra Edition.
Vibes: Acknowledging pure personal taste elements and biases - whether I like the dice-rolling system, the genre, the editorial commentary etc., independent of whether they actually affect the experience or provide any value to a hypothetical abstract reader.
Overall 0-5 star score: Score is the average of Form and Function, rounded in favour of Function. I subscribe to the belief that a middling score should actually mean middling quality, not 'it was crap but I don't want to be harsh,' so 3s or even 2s are not bad results. These reviews still trend towards 4-star results, but that's because I, uh, tend to play games I like. Broadly speaking:

0 - Don't play this, spare yourself.
✯ - Interesting primarily as a negative example of unsuccessful design.
✯✯ - Either unoriginal or original elements have poor execution, but playable and potentially interesting.
✯✯✯ - Meets the basic standards of its genre and format. Fun, if you like what it's selling.
✯✯✯✯ - Significantly innovative or remarkably successful in execution. Of interest to any designer.
✯✯✯✯✯ - A remarkable, hopefully field-redefining, work. Everybody should play at least once.

Will it work for a Halloween one-shot? Given the time, I have to answer the real question. Based on theme and intended structure of play.

1. Until Sunrise - 1-page Forged in the Dark-based survival horror
AceEmpress (2021) itch.io

Test conditions

I ran a ~4-hour game of US for six people, only one of whom I knew very well beforehand, last October. The premise was that they were all students, who'd been infected and poisoned by an academic mentor who was really a grotesque lycanthropic parasite, looking to weed out the weak and choose a successor. They had to survive, as the game suggests... until sunrise. The game gives characters 'magic, or something of similar terrifying coolness,' and in this case that was partial transformations into their own beast forms. The game does suggest the use of task clocks and clocks for how close the characters' powers are to betraying them, but I added one to track how long it was until dawn. Ultimately, about half the characters died, taking quite a few of the friends and authorities they sought help from with them. The remainder confronted the beast in a hospital and stabbed it to death with silver cutlery a little before the sun rose. I gave the game a 3/5 for my personal experience.

Form ✯

No internal art, but it's a one-pager so that's fair enough. There's a piece of 'cover art', but it doesn't appear on the cover or even the dedicated itch page for the game, only as a thumbnail on the author's main page, so it's entirely possible to get the game without ever knowing it exists - as I originally did. It's a photograph of a shadowy, graffiti-covered sub-terrene urban space of some sort, and works absolutely fine but doesn't exactly sparkle with mood.
There are a couple of small inspirational tables, but their contents are mostly very generic. If we're following the old 'conceptual density' heuristic, well, all the entries bar one are either something I could have thought of when I heard the term 'survival horror' or so vague as to effectively require me to fully define them. The former can be forgiven in a short game designed to produce an archetypal experience, the latter less so.
The writing is generally good, and the short sections on premise and GM principles were handy touchstones as I pitched and ran the game, but I didn't feel either of them defined what I did with it, they just saved some time. This could have been a two or a one, but there just isn't quite enough packed in here to justify the higher rating. 'Enough packed in here' is not an impossibility for a short game, either - see for example something like my favourite 24XX game, 24BLUE. 

Function ✯✯

One two-sided page, there's only so much you can expect, but US impressively managed to deliver a basic system which functions with no major gaps in one of those pages (mostly), leaving the other for general advice. Of the three stats, Trust, Adrenaline, and Overthinking, Trust seemingly comes up less with the kinds of actions players tend to take but allows characters to help others with rolls more easily. The level of danger for the characters is measured on a seven-tick Panic track, and rules for shifting Panic between PCs or suffering it to help others reinforce the bond of friendship that the game suggests PCs share. So do rules on flashbacks, which were very useful for emphasizing safe moments of rest to break up the pacing of the session.

However, there are issues. The game's brevity makes the fact that it's poorly organized more disappointing. The section on how to add dice to your rolls precedes the section on how to roll. A section explaining 'difficulty, clocks, position, and effect' is included amongst more abstract GM tools and refers you directly to Blades in the Dark task resolution concepts without any explanation or even a page reference. I realize there may not be many indie RPG fans who haven't memorized Blades, but as one of them I was frustrated by this. These issues are nitpicky and fixable for a one-page game that can be read quickly, but given the point of presenting a game in such a low-detail format is largely to increase usability I'm rating them as harshly as if they were in a 200-page book. 
More seriously, although it emphasizes in its advice section that 'tempo is important for running good horror', the mechanics don't provide much help in creating it. It's not very clear how often Panic should be awarded and for what - this could be much more clearly tied to particular roll results, whereas instead there's a lot of talk about 'some complication, or cost' and 'things get worse, or you fail, or you pay a high cost'. Further, although the PCs 'have exactly one goal, which is to survive the night', there's no kind of track given for how long this should be. I'd understand this in a longer game where you don't know how a GM's going to be using it, but for a two-pager selling itself on creating one particular type of story it's disappointing.

Vibes

The game was made for a jam, which is a place to throw ideas at a wall fast and see what sticks. I like a lot of it, so I feel a bit mean being so critical. That said, it also put a lot of extra work on me that I wasn't expecting when I signed up to run it, so I'm a bit frustrated at that. 

✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: Yes, if you can overcome the issues above

2. Poison'd (Ashcan version) - Forge-era 'narrativist' gritty 18th-century pirate action
D. Vincent Baker (2007) Lumpley Games

Test conditions

I ran a ~4-hour session of this with a group of... I want to say 6, 8 folks? last November. I didn't know most of them well beforehand. I leaned very heavily on its internal plot-generation, because I didn't have much time to prep. I had fun but didn't love it (rated 3/5 for my experience) but the players had enough fun that they bribed me with copious quantities of alcohol to run a follow-up session. The follow-up also hewed very close to the game, but was a lot zanier in tone and drew more on the supernatural elements of the setting. Again, I gave it 3/5 for personal enjoyment, but the players loved it. Honestly I do not remember that much of the plot of either. 
The only element I changed is that, whilst I generally liked the game's openness about how shitty life as a pirate could be and frank portrayal of cycles of violence and abusive behaviour, I wasn't up for that extending to sexual violence. I especially wasn't up for that in a game with people I didn't know well. So I just cut the option for that as one of the 'Violences' a character had suffered/inflicted from the character sheets I made. Technically, this makes a slight difference to the potential balance of character creation since some character stats are based on the Violences they've suffered in their past, but there's a long list of options so it's only a very slight one.

Form ✯✯✯✯

Poison'd is 26 pages long and basically every line of text is trying to wrench you out of your modern mindset and into the 18th-century Caribbean. Quite a specific bit of it: the crew of the Dagger, whose brutal captain has just been poisoned (title credits roll) by the cook. This story is interwoven through character creation and is the point where any game will start. 
The tone of the writing is informal and archaic both. 'Every PC's a pirate.' 'You may count a sin twice, if your character's commission of it has been prolonged, repeated, excessive, and unremorseful, and continues to be so even now.' The list of sins is entirely of its time and world. Sodomy and idolatry sit alongside murder and robbery. If your character is a woman, that's the sin of blasphemy. Twice blasphemy 'if she has also somehow contrived to fuck women as a man.' Also she's living in disguise, no choice about it.
This is I think genuinely clever needle-threading between the two poles of ignoring historical gender- and sexuality-based oppression entirely and reactionary screeching of 'no women allowed in muh realistic gritty setting'. It acknowledges the existence of women and queer sexualities in these spaces through the lens of the period's dominant Christian ideology, which is easy enough for most people likely to be playing this game (certainly amongst my relatively young, female/NB-skewed player group in 2023-4) to  immediately categorize as flawed and therefore have fun subverting through the cracks the game is highlighting for you. We joked about mimicking a certain Terry Pratchett novel with all of the characters being women in disguise unbeknownst to each other, which I don't think quite happened but we got close! We didn't focus on this topic much, but the exploration that did incidentally happen was nevertheless mature and I think the game's text subtly guided us towards that.
This might just be us, but even though I used a pretty extensive CW list when running the game I felt a lot of the trust the group built around issues of gender, oppression, violence etc. came from the text itself, and that it manages this whilst never breaking character is doubly impressive. I've yet to see a big commercial game handle any of this anywhere close to as well, with Mage: the Ascension and Wraith: the Oblivion probably being the closest competitors.

There are three pages of 'possibly true facts about pirates' at the end. These are handy, and placed well.
The design and layout is minimalistic. One heading font, one text font, white pages, no art except a skull-and-crossbones on the cover and a few black pirate silhouettes. The latter I'm not sure about, I think possibly either more or less would have been better. That said, as an overall design it really works. It's sparseness leaves you alone with the brutality, with what's in the text. It doesn't romanticize, nor does it aim to shock with splatters of gore. You have to make your own decisions about what you're reading. I can't find anything suggesting the final release (which I couldn't locate a copy of anywhere :( ) is different from the ashcan in this regard.

Function ✯✯✯✯

You define your Dagger, and work out what you suffered at Cap'n Brimstone Jack's hands and others', and this will all be mechanically relevant. Your stats are determined from your character's life experience - Brutality equals the number of Violences you've suffered, for example. The starting plot is programmed in - you need to elect a new captain and decide what to do with the treacherous cook, you're being chased by a British ship, and you're low on provisions. Additional dynamics are added by networks of promises and connections between players, also decided during character creation. From there, the game feels like something out of the modern proceduralist movement: the characters take actions which can (in combination with other events and framing) bring particular events into play, such as 'The King's agents' arriving 'whenever any player's pirate is being free in port' or 'Hell' when 'all three, the ship's captain has suffered damnation, debauchery is in play, and any player's pirate kills someone.' That 'damnation' is literal, by the way - the early modern Christian worldview is deep in the mechanics, and God, the devil, and ghosts may all play a very direct part despite the setting's lack of anything especially fantastical. A character fought Triton in my second game, though that was probably a salt-induced hallucination. You can definitely see the seeds of Apocalypse World (released by Baker and his wife Meguey Baker three years later) being planted: the GM needs to do very little to keep the story rolling except respond to the decisions of players with the appropriate events, and these events create a very clear flow of narrative causality which makes it easy to create the kinds of brutal and desperate stories the game wants you to. It'd be even better if these events were presented on cards so everyone could see what was 'in play', and I made some for my game. (The lack of resources was a general flaw - I also had to make a character sheet for players. I've put both here, to be used as you will.)

Conflict is resolved on a pretty simple principle: 'it will always come to a fight'. Anything else the characters do with their abilities will, at most, give them an advantage in the form of re-roll tokens ('Xs') when the fight comes. The players were a bit frustrated by this at first, but we all found it quite liberating after a while to go at events knowing that at some point there would be violence but frantically positioning to have the best odds possible when it came. Fighting is much more about tension than tactics - choosing whether to back down and suffer a consequence, or risk a worse one by escalating and taking another chance. It wasn't always clear how this interacted with multi-character fights and attempts to intervene on another's behalf - there are rules for combats between companies or mobs, but it's ambiguous who decides whether to escalate and what kinds of actions individuals can take to shift the outcome. This came up a couple of times, and whilst far from insoluble it was a rare case where the rules left the work to me. Incidentally, deciding to carry as many weapons as possible is a pure upside within the system, though in practice people didn't take advantage of this. 
Those nitpicks aside, the system is excellent - a funnel which takes the starting plot, channels it into violence, channels that violence into consequences and those into new elements of plot, all with a minimum of effort from the GM. The book is short and modestly well-laid-out, so easy enough to reference although the relative lack of art removes one of the things I normally use for signposting sections to myself. The lack of a map of the Caribbean is slightly frustrating, since when chased by the British crown I suspect that the first action of many will be to ask 'where's the nearest foreign port', but such things can be found online with some effort. Maybe you just make up a Caribbean that never was.

Vibes

Truly I think I'm just not that into pirates? No, that can't be true, I'm a sometime Pirates of Sartosa player in Warhammer, and it isn't because I like getting ripped to shreds by anyone with shooting ranged longer than 12". Maybe the issue is historical fiction with minimal fantastical elements. Obviously from the review I think the game is pretty exceptional, but I absolutely would not have run it a second time without bribes. 
Non-combat checks are rolled as contests between two of the character's own abilities. i.e. you'd roll Brutality vs. Soul to kill a helpless captive. I just like this - your greatest enemy is always yourself, and suffering can make you better at some things (stats are based on narrative elements, don't forget) but it will reduce your ability to do others.

When picking weaknesses for your ship's crew, I strongly recommend 'it doesn't have a strong common language, relying on pidgin and guessing,' especially if some of your players speak Spanish, French etc. We did this, and roleplayed it throughout, to great comic effect.

✯✯✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: If you want to play into the supernatural elements, I suppose, but even then it's likely to lend itself towards a very specific sort of splatterpunky religious horror.

3. Pathfinder 2nd Edition (pre-revision) - Crunchy d20 heroic fantasy tactics
Logan Bonner, Jason Bulmahn, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Mark Seifter, and James Jacobs (2019) Paizo Inc.

Test conditions

I played a short solo Pathfinder combat for a concept I was originally writing for Reddit but which will probably end up here, pitting 4 starting PCs against 6 basic thugs in every system I own and seeing what happens. I'd owned it a few years, tried to build characters and been put off by how hard it was, but discovering Pathbuilder and then playing out a combat it was as if a veil was lifted. I absolutely loved it! Soon after I wrangled some friends into playing a hack of the old D&D classic The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh in it, which was poorly balanced and ended up killing them all over about 5 hours (wow - a game where a Hard encounter is actually a Hard encounter!) but was roundly enjoyed. I gave it 4/5 for personal experience.

Form ✯✯✯

Every time I try to read lore about Golarion, my eyes start to glaze. This is no particular slight on it; I do much the same with most generic D&D settings, outside the weirder corners, and I'm probably just not seeing the weirder corners of Golarion because I didn't spend most of my teenage years obsessing over Pathfinder. That said, when I do see talk about those weirder corners, what seems to be lurking in them is mostly Lovecraft ripoffs. And look, GRRM manages that with Essos but I'm just not sure that cosmic tentacle monsters are as scary in a world where character capabilities go up to level 20 (Lumberjeses aside). I probably can't be too critical, though - let's say for now that the core book does not fill me with a desire to inhabit its world nor does it give me ideas for my own.

Speaking of character capabilities and the core book, however, these are much more interesting. Yes, there are a few too many variants of 'this hurts somebody' or 'this buffs a roll slightly' across magic items and spells for my tastes, but A) that makes sense given the game's focus and B) buried in amongst those are some, such as the Snake Oil, Sigil, or most of the Ritual spells, which are full of narrative potential and which I've borrowed ideas from liberally as plot seeds for other games. Meanwhile, having interesting, dynamic traps and hazards like the avalanche or armageddon orb in the core rulebook places a lot of different story possibilities in front of the GM from the get-go. I immediately started brainstorming plots when looking at these.

The prose, being focussed on presenting clear mechanics, is rarely inspirational. This is to the mild detriment of form and the significant advantage of function. It at least has the merit of keeping low-conceptual-density descriptions brief - so of the demonic sorcerer bloodline, for example, we hear only that 'Demons debase all they touch. One of your ancestors fell victim to their corruption, and you are burdened by that sin.' All you need to know, really!
Similarly, the art is generally illustrative rather than exciting, though there are a few exceptions - see for example the human cultures, and the start of the treasure section. The styles of the various artists never seem inconsistent. I've had the physical book since shortly post-release, and it's very high-quality.

Function ✯✯✯✯✯

I don't know if I've ever seen a game do tactical combat this well - and see my thoughts on LANCER, below, to see that that's a high bar. In the games I ran, people circled each other, swashbucklers backflipped over foes, tables were used as barricades, and these things happened not because somebody decided to sacrifice effectiveness for coolness but because the optimal choice in that moment was also the cool thing to do. I truly, truly cannot imagine how much work went into making this the case. The Barbarian in our group felt a little less interesting in play than the other characters, but I think the gap would probably reduce at higher levels.
The book is well-laid-out, with a reference bar in the side and coloured page-edges to make chapter navigation easy. The text always lays out the rules clearly and concisely, and cross-referencing between sections is good. If something's still hard to find - and it often is, there are a lot of rules - then there's always Archives of Nethys, the completely free online database of all of the rules, which has a great search function. For a game this dense, once you've made a character (for which I strongly recommend Pathbuilder) play is remarkably fluid. Having a single book for all the basic player and GM material helps, of course.

The book's also full of genuinely useful advice. A lot of it felt quite redundant as an experienced DM, but not all by any means. It's also, as mentioned above, got treasure, traps, hazards - basically everything a GM would need except monsters, all in one place.

Vibes

A lot of the art is a bit too smooth for my taste. It fits the setting and tone, I think, it just isn't my thing. It's not not my thing, just... you know. I also don't love just how powerful adding level to all your rolls would eventually make the PCs, but the GM guide introduces a variant rule to deal with that, or there's no barrier I can see to just running it as E6.

✯✯✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: The focus is tactical, so it's not ideally suited to creating a horrifying atmosphere and the rapid power-scaling means if you are able to present the PCs with a real threat they're quite likely to either die or have to ignore the best bit of the game, combat! That said, it has extensive rules for hauntings and traps so an adventure fighting horror monsters is very possible.

4. Yuggothi Confidential - Single-PC Lovecraftian pulp sci-fi
Wythe Marshall and Ethan Gould (2020) itch.io

Test conditions

Ran a ~4-hour game for five players, a couple of whom I knew pretty well, a couple of whom less so. The Mi-Go holobiont (collective rhizo-mechanical entity) they were all collectively playing the distinct functions of was sent to earth to trade some tech for human brains with a mortal corporation in Manchester, UK, but that corporation was also trading with their arch-enemies the Void Elves. The Mi-Go avoided causing a dimensional rift, and narrowly escaped having carved a burning swathe through much of Manchester and embedded its spacecraft into a mountain. I rated it 4/5 for personal enjoyment.
One slight change I made: rather than giving the Mi-Go as a whole a couple of personal goals for the scenario, I had the player of each function roll for one, re-rolling any that directly contradicted each other since the holobiont is a co-ordinated entity. It worked pretty well.

Form ✯✯✯✯✯

The cover art looks like this:

So an immediate +80 stars or so for that? I look at this and immediately the traditional expectations of the TTRPG cover ('this is what you'll be playing') clash with the fungal composite weirdness of the image - which is, in fact, what you will be playing! At the same time, the... idk the word to use, but the 'pulpy' movie poster lineage is pretty clear. 50s 'nightmare from the DEEP' style things through to Re-Animator - you know what I'm talking about!

 This clearly isn't a conventional adventure-y TTRPG, but if you saw the 'Yuggothi' in the name and thought you knew what was going on here this is also likely to shake that certainty somewhat. As will WE ARE FUN/YES, of course.

And so it should, because whilst it is 'a roleplaying game about mi-go' YC is very clear throughout that these are not Lovecraft's mi-go. Or maybe they are, if you happen to be a random human observing them, but they/the game have/has a sense of humour about it. For every character objective to 'Vivisect one more

healthy sapient brain to add to your collection (thereby out-collecting your principal rival). You

don’t really care about the brain, at this point; you just want to gloat', there's a comment that 'You live on the planet Yuggoth, which the apes call “Pluto” in honor of an imaginary villain… The climate on Yuggoth is pleasant, just cold enough to freeze nitrogen.' There's a really clever balance struck which underlines how distinct the Mi-Go collective is from humanity: yes, they might be doing terrible things, but those things are largely trivial and easily dismissed to them. In our game, the sociopathic comedy of it all really helped people get into behaving in a way detached from human empathy, and I think its ability to do that with thirteen short pages is exceptional - more on this below. I could go on and on quoting, but the game is PWYW so you should absolutely get it and see for yourself.

Conceptual density is off the charts, to an extent that's frustrating whilst trying to write a review because I haven't even talked about how disgustingly Mi-Go ships and technology are described yet, or about how the science-fantasy individualist aestheticism of the Void Elves makes them a perfect counterpoint to Yuggothi sci-horror collectivism...

Oh, and the art, whilst not stylistically unified, is all equally good, from things that look like they could have been drawn by Scrap Princess for Veins of the Earth's starbound sequel, to the Mi-Go on page 4 which could be a colourized magnification of something that gave you a small panic attack when you discovered that millions of them live 'perfectly naturally' in your pores.

Function ✯✯✯

The core resolution system is pretty light, but still unintuitive. Basically, whenever a character wants to do anything, all players, including the GM, roll dice, which for the players are either their ACT die to themselves act (at the same time) or their CON die to convince other characters to do something. Die sizes for the players range from d4 to d20 depending on which of the Mi-Go collective's Functions they are playing. There are five functions, Security, Physical, Knowledge, Executive, and Mimetic, and each has different areas of concern and different special abilities which  interact with this process.

If a player beats a GM's roll with their ACT, they do something successfully, unless another player has rolled CON to stop them and gotten something higher. I could have done with a little more explanation and some examples on this interaction; whether CON could convince multiple functions at once tripped me up for a bit. The tone of the rules is generally strict enough that I expected there to be an answer to several questions that I ended up having to rule on, which slowed things down a little, and the section is confusingly laid out which exacerbated the issue. This is a bit of an issue since it's basically all of the rules.

That said, this is a minor quibble for a game which undoubtedly clears the high bar it's set itself in terms of tonal and narrative objectives. The rules naturally lead players to both the collective action and the 'legalistic arguing' the game suggests should sometimes exist between the functions. At the same time, it recognizes that they aren't near-immortal aliens, and will likely need some sense of a narrative arc to enjoy the game; this is handled smoothly without disrupting the tone. 

Now, you might think it'd be hard to come up with good plots for a collective being taking the form of a superscientist crab-tank. Not so at all! 'The flavourful bits' at the end of the book present the aforementioned list of personal objectives, customizable for varying morality, some 'interlopers on or around yuggoth' to create an initial situation, and some strange and wonderful major technologies for the characters to deploy, some of which will just resolve problems but most of which will introduce new and interesting complications. Plot doesn't quite write itself as it does with some more procedural games, but you'll have plenty of time to develop it whilst the functions argue about how to resolve any given situation. 

Vibes

It's really fascinating to watch how quickly less ethical solutions begin to get aired and accepted once you mix comedy with committee. During my game, I had to remind people that starting a human breeding program to obtain brains wasn't acceptable in the environment we were playing in. This is both praise for how well the game places you in an alien mindset, and a reminder to use safety tools and be ready to be firm with them.

YC leans very hard towards the style of RPG where the players make big decisions and face the consequences, rather than where they respond to the world, and that's a particular sweet spot of mine. If you like it too, you'll like the game.

✯✯✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: Sure, but expect the PCs to be the ones doing the scaring! 

5. Lancer - Tactical d20 (4e-ish) weird mecha
Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan (2019) Massif Press

Test conditions

After I wrapped up a short Mongoose Traveller 2e campaign, a friend volunteered to take over that campaign slot and run Lancer. We played 6 sessions over about two months before various other personal commitments killed the game. It was a lot of fun, tied for the longest I've ever played a game. Session-by-session ratings for my personal enjoyment fluctuated in the 4-5 band. We were mostly playing off the core book and basic COMP/CON (the VTT, of which much more below) features with very minimal homebrewing, though the setting was the GM's homebrew creation. It was very much on the mud, blood, and shit end of perspectives on war, and if baseline LANCER casts you as somewhere between UN peacekeepers and a US 'intervention', this setting had us as inhabitants of a 'mysteriously' unstable but mineral-rich third-world country on the receiving end thereof. Enormous credit to the GM.

I took the opportunity of this game to be nerdy about character builds instead of rules design for once, so my knowledge is limited to what I saw in the course of play.

Form ✯✯✯✯ (being a bit generous)

Hard to comment too much, as we were playing in the aforementioned homebrewed setting which avoided some of the more obvious 'gaps' in the worldbuilding and I didn't read the GM bits of the core book. That said, the art is famously beautiful, with an immediately distinctive and coherent style; and the little bits of description inserted into the mech sheets are definitely inspirational, mostly for interesting kinds of lab accident the PCs might have to clean up after. 

The game has the kind of toyetic rules that should themselves count as a source of inspiration from a player perspective; I made a number of really odd mechs every week whilst writing notes, my favourite of which was the Atlarossa Siege Bodysuit.

To quote the Superheavy Mounting core bonus: 'you'd be surprised how large a gun you could fit on a chassis if you ripped out peripheral systems.' Presumably the 'peripheral systems' here include a couple of physical laws.

Alas, I'm given to understand that the vast majority of NPCs do not use PC mechs, so presumably it's somewhat difficult to take inspiration from all those wonderful rules for your antagonists? (This is an issue that I have with many modern games, though I recognize what the goal of this differentiation is).

Function ✯✯✯✯

LANCER is not trying to be a physics engine. Combat and narrative are very clearly divided by the medium of Are You in the Fucking Robot? Narrative is very lightly scaffolded, with a skill system of sorts that allows you to make simple rolls to determine outcomes, a few bits of personal equipment, and a couple of tasks you can undertake to help you next time you're on a mission. Combat is the bulk of the game and, let's face it, the reason you're playing it.

And it's really good! Fun tactical system, good action economy. 90% of the time it seems to be that you want to pick either options which are built-in to your character sheet or basic building-block universal actions which directly set them up, and it was obvious when our GM was having to work a bit harder to improvise around some of the more combat-as-war strategies we used (collapsing a pile of rubble on an unaware enemy column, taking time to fully conceal mines on a battlefield before foes arrived) but it didn't break the game to do so or anything. PCs are very tough indeed compared to enemies, which is an odd feel for a game about slamming mechs into each other at high speeds to have,  even if the PCs are elite pilots - I felt that a bit more lethality for us and a bit less for our foes would have improved the feel of challenge that the game is going for. As it was, we were often in danger, but we had to fight five or six times our own numbers to get there, and even then I found that often sticking it out in the face of seemingly-overwhelming odds would actually allow a PC to triumph. It'd be hard to put a determined group of players in a situation where retreat is optimal without a genuinely murderous setup, I think. On the bright side, fights have objectives so the numbers and PC survivability involved rarely meant it turned into a slog.

The biggest strength was, again, how fun character-building and then using your cool new abilities felt. Every mission you could bring a custom-tailored mech made with the options available to the Licenses you had, and every License Level gained unlocked new and weird combinations. Circumventing some of your initial limitations in this slow, 'earned' manner can feel wonderful. At the same time, starting characters don't feel boring, with a high degree of customization and a potent basic mech in the Everest. Playing the game, particularly when I put my wargaming head on and got into trying to optimize within the constraints of the action system, was a lot of fun, but I think I'd find the apparent brutality of war in even the basic setting very dissonant with the mechanics if I tried to GM it.

Vibes

The tumblr posts I linked above, and the positively vicious responses of some of the community and authors to similar critiques, have kind of permanently altered my view on the game TBH. I'm trying to put that aside here. Another personal frustration from an immersion perspective is how game-y the mission objectives often feel (i.e. being able to escape a faster, flying foe simply by walking off a map edge.)

✯✯✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: Uhhh there's probably a way to do it (involving rogue HORUS biomechs?) but I can't think of many worse genres or playstyles to do something horror-y in than tactical combat mecha.

6. Royal Blood - Tarot-based storytelling urban-esoteric heist
Grant Howitt (2019) Rowan, Rook and Decard Ltd.

Test conditions 

I ran a ~4 hour game for 7 or 8 people. The Arcane (the Major Arcana of the Tarot whose power the PCs were going to steal) was Strength, and the setting was a fairly generic massive sprawling urban landscape as suggested by the book. The PCs ultimately dealt with Strength, who ran a financial empire via Her pawns, by supporting a small anarchist insurrection in The City, only to have the most amoral and ruthless 3 of the group (all themselves in finance) betray everybody else at the end and ascend together as the Arcane of Avarice, prompting me to create the beautiful image below:

It was a good game; I rated it 5/5 for personal enjoyment and one of the players has run several games since!

Form ✯✯✯✯

RB is available as a PDF or as a slender and remarkably hardwearing paperback book. It isn't replete with art or anything, which is a bit of a shame given the tarot theme but what can you do? It is still remarkably nicely designed, in a way that manages to create a nebulous sense of setting in its dark-yet-richly-coloured backgrounds. Images of gold-trimmed furniture and neon-lit streets give a sense of the aesthetic the game's trying to get you to invoke.

Meanwhile, the text is incredibly punchy - it's quite common for an A4 page to have fewer than a hundred words - and packed with flavour and ideas. The characters of the Empire of Wands, for example, all channel some aspect of 'Fire, ENERGY, creation, destruction, THE SMASH AND GRAB, the world in the palm of your hand, towering edifices, impossible momentum, something raw and bestial behind your eyes'. The 'GM' is 'FATE HERSELF ... a green-eyed goddess in tripartite, a woman of warp and weft and infinite wit ... your worst friend and your best enemy'. As will be discussed below, it's relying on these brief flashes of notion to spark the entire game, so it's a good thing that they work so well. Much as with the tarot it mechanizes, RB's descriptions lean into archetypes that permeate culture, and I almost never found myself looking at a description of a character or setting element and wondering how to implement it. This might produce an overly-cliched result in another game, but the strange combinations of archetypes in RB, along with its improvisational and highly variable nature, mean you're very unlikely to end up with a boilerplate outcome.

Similarly praiseworthy are the alternate settings presented at the end of the book. If going to war with the tarot themselves is a bit esoteric for your tastes, why not play as gods or vampires? I know one person who's run the vampire variant to significant success, and all of them feel like they fit the core rules. As a VtM lover, the vampire variant definitely has a certain appeal...

The only real quibble I have with the game's presentation is its choice of font, a very light sans serif which doesn't feel quite mystical enough and is also sometimes slightly hard to scan despite the large print.

Function ✯✯✯ (possibly being ungenerous)

RB works pretty well. You make characters by picking one of the Court cards of the Thoth tarot - well, sort of. There's also an option for the King of the Rider-Waite &c.; the game suggests you pick either Kings or Princesses to use, but given you don't keep hold of your card (to do so mucks up the maths of the core mechanic, which is a shame) I don't see why you couldn't allow both. Players ask each other questions to define the messy relationships between their strange little band of supernatural criminals, and choose a secret motivation based in greed, pride, loyalty or revenge. They also choose two 'facets' from a list of six, three 'silver' or magic(k?)al options and three 'blood' or mortal. Each of these is a skill you have, like 'inspiring leader' (blood) or 'become water' (silver). You can pick 2 of one or 1 of each. These aspects are almost the entire character: you have to stake one in order to attempt a task, damaging or losing it if you fail, and when both are lost your card inverts, your character's deep dark secret is revealed, and their life is suddenly on the line. 

(At some point, I'd love to playtest a variant where you do keep your card and see how much harder it makes things, because in the end the PCs very comfortably won our game. Failing that, though, I might keep a second deck on hand to dole out court cards from, because I think they'd make for a great 'character sheet'.)

Anyway, once this is done the players collaboratively place down 'silver' (coins) to define the 'Box' around the target Arcane, the obstacles in the way of the source of their power. These aren't always allies of the Arcane - sometimes, they're a resource the PCs have that needs some effort to deploy right. (As in my game, an upgraded Killdozer which was going to be used to smash through a bank's wall and make a 'quick' getaway). This section represents the process of casing the joint, and the PCs describe themselves investigating in brief. The rest of the game consists of a series of scenes where players narratively position to use their PCs' facets to overcome aspects of the Box by stripping all the Silver coins from them. They might do this through violence, seduction, bribery, stealth, magic(k?) etc. - whatever they have the facets for, the system handles it the same: with the draw of a card determining whether they fail and lose a facet, fail and damage a facet, succeed and steal a silver off the card or succeed and subvert the card to their own ends, gaining it as a new facet. It's a very tight little mechanic which comes together nicely and doesn't have any particular flaws. Essentially the same system is used for facing down and ultimately usurping the Arcane. At the end of the game when the PCs turned on each other it was even easy enough to quickly adapt into a PvP system, which I don't think was remotely intended but probably should have been given the implied amorality of the characters and the limited options for Arcane ascent. 

If I have one complaint about the system it's that there's very little tactical and no particular strategic consideration to it. There are basic probability decisions to be made about when to use a couple of options the PCs have to manipulate card draws, but no real levers for Fate Herself to make things easier or harder for them based on the resources they choose to deploy or the angles they take. That's almost a vibes comment; the game works extremely well at replicating the structure of a heist movie, but part of that is that the heist is going to go off and probably going to succeed. In this sense, the mechanic functionally serves to randomize which characters are going to make it through to the end, which ones are going to be the MVPs of the heist, and how long the whole thing will take (under 4 hours with my large group; the rulebook suggests that 2-3 hours is enough for a quick playthrough,) rather than to make success challenging to achieve. That's fine, of course, but might be worth highlighting to your players since, although it must surely have been the intent, I don't think the game's 100% transparent about it.

Vibes

Tarot's cool and occult modern settings (as opposed to urban fantasy) are still a little underexplored throughout fiction in spite of the best efforts of Alan Moore and his epigones, so this was fun. I also appreciated the ease of converting the system to PvP. There's nothing strictly wrong with a system where PCs literally cannot fight without extensive homebrewing, but it always disappoints me as somebody who habitually runs PvP-allowed games - see my thoughts on Lancer above. I may write a post at some point about my constant desire to ignore the 'WARNING! DO NOT MAKE PCs FIGHT OTHER PC-STATTED CHARACTERS' signs a lot of games seem to come with these days.
I like the deliberate gendering of Fate Herself (the GM.) A) it fits with the occult tone, given the feminist theology associated with a lot of occult movements associated with tarot use, and B) it's a lovely change from the conventional masculine assumption of Games Master. There's no annoying little 'wow we're doing this but you can not if you'd like' box, the choice is simply made. 

In spite of rating this lower than some of the other games, I personally enjoyed it at least as much as Poison'd or Yuggothi Confidential. I just think it's very reliant on the player group and GM all being confident improvisers.

✯✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: The Arcane can be pretty scary, the theme is suitably witchy and it's designed for one-shots. Do it! I recommend usurping the Fool, Magus, Hierophant, Lovers, or Sun.

7. 5th Edition D&D (pre-Tasha's) - Mid-crunch d20 heroic fantasy
Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford et al (2014) Wizards of the Coast

Test conditions

I had decided that I wanted to run D&D 5E RAW. I'd never done this before! When I first played it I had tried to reverse-engineer rules for character creation and levelling from the starter set, leading to I.E. 'roll d20 down the line, re-roll results below 6' at character generation and the rapid introduction of questionable homebrew content from the dreaded D&D Wiki to fill in gaps in rules access. Later, I found useful and fun homebrew and stuck to that for as long as 5e was my main game and beyond, until my homebrew rules metamorphosed into an entirely different system. So this'd be an interesting experience.

I do really mean RAW. The principle was that, whilst I'd bridge genuine gaps with extrapolation, I wanted to create a setting that was as quintessentially early (pre-Tasha's Cauldron of Everything) 5E as possible, using only material I could justify based on the books and ideally creating a sort of 'minimal' setting that stuck to what the books said were the essentials. I'd describe this as a practical exercise in the 'implied setting' exegeses that seem to be popular in the OSR space (and arguably 3.5 with the Tippyverse, though that's a little different.)

The one thing I didn't do was assume the PCs were engaged in An Adventure. I wanted to create a 'Gygaxian naturalistic' world using the given rules for random encounter frequency, monster presence etc., randomly generating dungeons and quest hooks when triggered by interaction with appropriate areas of the world. As such, I also ignored the encounter balance rules, randomizing what level encounters were (strongly tending low, at least outside of dungeons). I'll write another post detailing my full methods someday, perhaps. Arguably this went directly against the text, on which more below.

Naturally, I wanted an environment where this somehow-unique game could fully flourish. I chose running it for 16 straight hours, immediately after the aforementioned second game of Poison'd, for a group of people whose numbers varied at times from 3 (one of whom was asleep) to over a dozen. I'd like to thank caffeine, and also alcohol, for their kind assistance.

In this game, which was played using a 6-mile-scale hexmap of post-roman-withdrawal Britain as the base (though this informed Very Little of the setting except names) the characters began in the town of Durobrivae, travelled 48 miles North along the road to Causennae (killing an allosaurus (MM) stalking the fields there) and discovered the town had been taken over by an aggressively-Neutral Gnome alchemist and his retinue. They considered going into the Fens to look for a dungeon rumoured there, but ultimately decided to keep following the road North to the city of Lindum instead and do some research on its location. There, they discovered an ancient temple of the Morrigan (goddess of War) had opened up beneath the city, and descended to loot it. They entered the first room, where the temple's gatekeeper, a heavily-betreasured Warlord (VGM), waited with his five pet Xorns (MM). Eight. Hours. Of. Combat. Later... the two surviving PCs fled the room and decided to go murder some Bugbears for cash instead, then with new companions they travelled back South along the road to look for a dungeon in a chasm near Braughing, got attacked by a Manticore (MM) in the woods, fled, got lost, eventually found the chasm, fell into the dungeon and were disappointed by the quality of loot in the bit they explored, at which point we wrapped the game.

The Heroes' Journey

The following books were in use: 

• The Player's Handbook (2014) - cited PHB 
• The Monster Manual (2014) - cited MM 
• The Dungeon Master's Guide (2014) - cited DMG 
• Volo's Guide to Monsters (2016) - cited VGtM 
• Xanathar's Guide to Everything (2017) - cited XGtE
• Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (2018) - cited MToF 
• Appendix A: Of Ships and the Sea in Ghosts of Saltmarsh (2019) which I'm frankly shocked to learn comes so late in this list, given how formative a part of my 5e experience it was (I started 5e in 2014) - cited GoS
• Winter survival rules from Rime of the Frostmaiden (2020) - cited RotF

Form ✯✯✯

Core 5e provides plenty of inspiration. The use value is mixed, of course, but I don't know of any other game that provides a table of random container contents for your dungeons (07-09 'bodily organs', 60-61 'lumps, unidentifiable'). There are D20 tables full of plot hooks liberally scattered through the DMG, alongside tables for fleshing out settlements, villains (a massive nested set - how about an antagonist who pursues '7/4 Reclaim stolen property and punish the thief' via '5/1 Breach of contract' and '19/1 Adultery'?), NPCs and almost anything else you care to think of. A lot of this content isn't massively unique, but it makes up for that by covering an enormous scope. It's up there with Demesne and Domination, Traveller, Veins of the Earth, Between the Skies, and FIST as one of those resources I always find myself coming back to when playing other games, in particular for the nested table of random major world events. Added to this, the optional and niche rules at the back are full of ideas for new types of scenario to introduce - sieges, plagues, poisoning the PCs with Midnight Tears to put them on a tight timer...

Outside the DMG, the pattern is mostly continued. Many of the major monster types are given whole chapters in VGtM and MToF, providing chapters full of detail on their faiths, conflicts, and settlements so they can be a dynamic element in any story they come up in. XGtE has random encounter tables, subdivided by character tier (rough level) for Every Environment, as well as random backstory tables for PCs. Again, none of these are especially conceptually dense, or even internally consistent amongst themselves (more on that when I do the specific post), but I'm entirely willing to forgive that when they're basically sufficient to simulate a world. GoS goes one step better and adds weird Odyssey-style random islands, some of which are wild, as well as strange undersea phenomena like Sapping Snow, marine snow that drains the life of anybody who stands on it due to its high concentration of negative energy.

The monster entries do have a few weaknesses, especially those not covered in detailed chapters. Tactics and strategies are rarely given, and where they are usually amount to a description of deployment and morale: 'Spined devils serve in the infernal legions as flying artillery, making up for their relative weakness by mobbing together to overwhelm their foes. ... they will quickly scatter if a fight goes against them.' There's a reason why The Monsters Know What They're Doing has been so successful. Additionally, a lot of the core monsters don't do that much that's interesting or makes you excited to run them, and although later books starting with VGM change that, VGM monsters don't appear in random encounter tables in XGtE so they aren't something the game encourages you to introduce naturally. It's not terrible, but given the other inspirational material is workaday and very little in the books is completely new this edition, it knocks it out of any chance of four stars.

Oh, yeah, the books are generally pretty, the art consistently presents interesting and dynamic scenarios that might start to generate ideas, and the bindings hold together well. I ran this game with my 2014-5 copies of the first few books, and believe me they've been used and abused since.

Function ✯✯✯

Dwiz of Knight at the Opera summed up many of my thoughts on the critiques of 5e in this post earlier this month. Whilst there are valid points to be made about how the game obviously isn't the best choice for a romantic comedy set in 1910s Berlin, WotC is dodgy as fuck, and a lot of 5e players seem to have a degree of learned helplessness or outright disdain vis the rules, the rules themselves are generally pretty good for running wandering heroic fantasy adventurers in a world that's about to get very scary very fast. 

What does the game aim to cover? Well, heroic fantasy by default apparently (DMG) but also a lot of other kinds of fantasy and some related genres like wuxia. Combat, clearly. Lots of the rules are about combat, and whilst I'm not going to linger on the well-documented balance issues between classes (I don't think they matter that much in play, and good fixes abound) I do think it's worth noting that many classes, especially non-casters with 'simpler' subclasses, have very minimal or no out-of-combat utility, whilst casters retain quite a lot. The way to solve this is to shove everyone through grinding resource depletion, of course, a process which would be a lot more fun if combats didn't take quite a long time once they get challenging. To be fair to the game, its default genre of 'dubiously-moral characters thrust into near-apocalyptic scenario and have to Save Everyone' is a better backdrop to doing this than is a dungeon framework, which is why, despite its clear attempts to conjure up nostalgia for 1st-3rd editions, I don't think 5e benefits as much from the kinds of adventures they do. Actually, probably the big bombastic plots that were come up with for it, up to Rime of the Frostmaiden, would have worked really well for it... if they'd bothered to track time. (Well done, Tomb of Annihilation.) But that's a different post.

Some of the procedures that have, in previous editions, underpinned a tale of characters rising from ratcatchers and politicking their way into local power, whilst still present, are undermined: Foraging checks take place 'whenever you call for it,' and no guideline is given; 9 generic strongholds are given with flat prices to construct them and no upkeep costs; retainers cost either 2 sp (unspecialized) or 2 gp, which... just for fun, some day, have a think about what that says of the 5e economy. XGtE fixed this somewhat with additional information on using trade tools, but many of those applications were more on-the-fly things that might be useful during an adventure. On the other hand, pages and pages of content on 'character objectives', 'framing events' and how to weave 'campaign themes' into an encounter. I think some of the complaints about the Ranger class 'solving exploration' probably need to be taken in this context - exploration might be dangerous for unspecialized characters, but that's an issue on par with not bringing a cleric to the Zombie Factory of the Lich Robber-Baron. Exploration isn't built to be the focus, even if it's presented as one pillar of play - or, less generously, exploration (and to a lesser extent social interaction) fail as coequal pillars of play with combat. They would require proactive system-crafting to place on an even footing - indeed, this is the basis of one of my ongoing game projects. Within that context though, classes like the Ranger or subclasses like the Mastermind Rogue actually feel strangely balanced - they aren't as strong in combat, but they can completely and trivially dominate a secondary area of play.

Does 5e succeed in feeling like 1st-3rd editions? It certainly has a lot of legacy elements from them, though clearly it hasn't killed the OSR or 3.5finder. Does it succeed at making a heroic fantasy story? I, uh, don't know because I think I ran something more like Sword and Sorcery in a heroic fantasy setting. Oops. It certainly provides plenty of advice to lead you that way, but it could probably be clearer. Is it a good game? Sadly, I'm going to have to settle on 'no.' It's not just the lack of focus, it's the fact that the pillar of play it does focus on semi-regularly produces unsatisfying encounters that don't threaten characters and are over too quickly. It gets away with a lot in general because it's loose enough that a good GM can make it work with minimal cognitive strain, but what I mostly got from it in RAW format was a lot of weird worldbuilding elements, likely unintended, not support in making the game run smoothly per se. It sneaks into a 3 by the sheer volume of content and options it supplies, but it's close.

Vibes

I'd like to state for the record that I focussed on pre-Tasha's material because I think it marks a distinct shift in the genre 5e aims at, not because I think that's bad or I'm upset that an orc can have +2 INT at chargen now. I quite like Tasha's as a book, even, but the early-5e genre has my heart.
It's genuinely hard, in fact, to disentangle what I've added to 5e/assumed is there from years of studying best practice, from what actually is. I love the game like a child, also, so it's tough to be mean.

✯✯✯

Halloween One-Shot: Essentially the same quibbles as Pathfinder. You might feel less bad skipping combat but on the other hand there's less rules support for specific trappings of horror unless you pick up Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. And even then, not that many TBH.

8. Dungeon At the End of the Multiverse - Indie ultra-crossover micro-game
Richard Kelly (2023) itch.io

Test conditions

So after I'd run Poison'd for 4 hours and 5e for 16 hours, I still had to run another session the same day (well, the next day by this point). For 22 players at once, most of whom had been awake for about as long as me and so had little energy to make new characters. NATURALLY I chose a system that begins with the words 'this game is a mess ... consider this a stress test of your GMing abilities. If you can lead a group to a good time in this system, you can run an absolutely banger game of anything.' 

Dear reader, I'm reliably informed (sadly I don't remember much of the session; my post-session assessment reads 'mystical experience??') that I can run an absolutely banger game of anything. 

Since the game allows you to play characters from any other game, I did nothing on that front. In retrospect I maybe should have learned the rules of the games they were bringing characters from, but ah well. I made a 'dungeon' which wasn't really a dungeon, it was more like one of those near/far concentric circle maps where the centre was one of my favourite monsters of all time: the (unfortunately named) Allabar, Opener of the Way, from 4th edition D&D's Monster Manual III. The characters had to complete challenges to pass through the reality-warp spilling off its body as it tried to collapse the heart of reality, all the while avoiding its soul-stripping gaze (which I added).

The map was a bit like this, from FFG Star Wars, but crudely drawn on an old Pathfinder battlemat

The PCs won, partly by giving the Opener of the Way therapy though they did stab it in the end. A good chaotic time was had by all. Several police officers called by a character from Alice is Missing died, to mutual rejoicing, but only one or two PCs for reasons that will shortly become clear. Many were left irreversibly changed.

Form ✯✯✯

5 pages long, not counting the title. One of those has 21 words. Everything is monochrome. The same font is not used twice in two separate sections, which somehow works? Gets the mood right, anyway: jumbled chaos. Think Mörk Borg without an art budget.

The basic setup, which I didn't use, is that there's a massive dungeon where people turn up when they die. If the players complete it, they come back to life and get a wish granted. That could be fun and even genuinely emotionally charged, which is an impressive thing for this game to even potentially invoke.

That's... really most of it! Not even a table of inspirations for what might be in said dungeon, which is a bit of a shame but I'm putting it down to intentional choice. The game won't blow your mind but it might make you chuckle.

Function ✯✯

Characters use whatever rules are on their sheets and the GM arbitrates how they interact, FKR style. The GM (who literally is the dungeon) cannot contradict these rules but can throw challenges at them. When killed, players can avoid death if one of their companions rips off a rule or stat and tapes it to their sheet, a delightful tactile element which does unfortunately mean the game doesn't really work for online play.

I uhhh. I don't have a lot to say here. The system undoubtedly achieves its intent, but it does so by looking the GM dead in the eyes, telling them the intent, smirking, and asking them to achieve it please. It is not trying to be balanced, it does not really provide systems, the intended experience is chaos. What would a failure state for such a game look like? I'd say 'this game could have been a blog post,' but at its length it basically is one, just with prettier design!

I suppose I should touch on the stat-swapping briefly, and the experience it created in play. The game seems to be aimed at one-shots, though I could be wrong, and at any rate would probably be a lot of stress for little sense of reward on GMs and players over the longer term. Given that fact, it seems unlikely you can present enough threats to plausibly chip away enough abilities (they can't be re-gifted once used to save somebody) that a PC dies - certainly not with 22 players, but even with 4-6! The only way for a PC to die is essentially going to be the other players deciding to be a dick/preserve their PC's intrinsic being. This feels like it could quickly swing what is pitched as a fun bit of chaos to either 'one person is sitting out feeling a bit miffed' or 'one person is pressured into ripping up a character they've grown attached to and/or experiencing a bit of existential horror.' This isn't necessarily bad, but weirdly I do think the game is one of the more likely ones on the list to need an explicit discussion of expectations and an X-card in play even with good friends, and I can't see that this was intentional because at no point does it raise it.

I couldn't decide whether the game was a 3 or a 2-star, but in the end I decided on 2. It's innovative, but it's not doing enough to support the innovation in my mind.

Vibes

I absolutely loved this game the moment I saw it. I knew I had to run it. The fact that I do not necessarily think it is a good game is so entirely beside the point that it's outside the dungeon. At the end of the Multiverse.

Halloween One-Shot: Uhh if everyone brings characters from a horror game I gueeeesss? Or if you play up the your-essence-being-ripped-apart-to-save-others aspect, maybe fill the dungeon with patchwork nightmare beings to show where that can lead.

✯✯

9-10. My own homebrews

But that's a story for another time.

My Top Three of the year:

1. Pathfinder 2e - Best combat of any game I've read bar none, character creation that I could do all day (with the Pathbuilder app, NOT WITHOUT) 
2. Poison'd - I don't like the genre but I plan to steal every single mechanic in this.
3. Yuggothi Confidential - Immense conceptual density paired with some interesting mechanical innovations.

My Halloween One-Shot Picks:

Royal Blood or Yuggothi Confidential, slightly leaning towards the former because I like scaring people rather than doing the scaring.

Happy Hallowe'en all. Good witching, good gaming, good all betwixt and both.